I'm sorry, can you please clarify how forcible removal of people is preferable to "you're welcome to stay with the understanding that you will no longer be considered citizens of our government but will instead be considered citizens of government X"?
Either the Federation is wrong for taking people from their homes, or the Federation is wrong for not taking people from their homes?
First of all, in "The Maquis" the 2nd part, Admiral Necheyev mentioned that the Maquis are still "citizens of the Federation". I don't know what the provisions of the treaty were, but that's what she said.
The Federation sold out their own colonists, but once the Feds were committed down this wrongheaded path, the burden falls on them to mitigate the damage of their decision.
In that same scene where Necheyev said that the Maquis are Federation citizens, she also said, "We never should've allowed those colonists to remain on the Cardassian side of the Demilitarised zone." But the Feds didn't do that.
They made a bad situation and subsequently made it worse.
Either the Federation is wrong for taking the people from their homes, or the Federation is wrong for not taking the people from their homes?
It was wrong for the Feds to sell out the colonists. Other posters have eloquently wrote about why that is so. I don't want to reiterate what they wrote. The point that I was trying to make was where the Federation went wrong (again) after it sold out the colonist, and as a response to a point you made. The burden of action should fall on the Federation, not the colonists.
The other irony, I suppose, is that once the decision to sell out the colonists was made, it probably was then best for all colonists, that would otherwise find themselves on the wrong side of the new border, to be removed, forcibly if necessary, before the treaty went into effect. That's the irony. It may even sound counterintuitive or contradictory.
Kira was right. There was no way that the Cardassians would allow the colonists to live in peace on their side of the new border, regardless of what the treaty said; and they demonstrated that by terrorizing the human colonists. The creation of the Maquis was a reaction to this, as well as the Federation abandoning them in the face of Cardassian hostility; but apparently not the original sellout.
I got the impression that there would have been no Maquis if no human nor Cardassian colonists, before the treaty went into effect, had been allow on the wrong side of the new border.
So the Federation's mishandling of the situation did indeed plant the seed for further conflict, hence the Maquis.
It's easy to criticize the Federation for the path they chose, but I haven't seen many instances of people proposing better options.
Once the timeline of events went past that point, why didn't the Federation just support the Maquis, like the Cardassian government supported their own paramilitary in the DMZ, instead of treating the Maquis as enemies?
While fighting the Maquis, did the Federation even demand that the Cardassians remove their colonists on the Federation side of the new border, for reciprocity's sake?
Did they try to renegotiate the treaty? The Feds could have warned -- through back channels (like through that Cardassian Legat who travelled to DS9) -- the Cardassians, that they would support the Maquis as the Cardassians were supporting their paramilitaries, unless the treaty was renegotiated to reincorporate the human planets back to the Federation side and vice versa. The Cardassians understand force. The Feds could have made the best of a bad situation that they helped to create.
But instead the Feds (Sisko) resorted to using biogenic weapons against their own people. The Cardassians must have been laughing at all this.